The Unruly Pleasures of the Mid-Manhattan Library

The New York Public Library’s Mid-Manhattan branch can appear to outsiders as a run-down hangout, but beneath its bleak, utilitarian architecture is an anything-goes spirit.

Photograph by Robert Wright / Redux

The Mid-Manhattan branch of the New York Public Library is situated a block south of the majestic main branch, on the same strip of Fifth Avenue near Bryant Park, but the two buildings are night and day. The Stephen A. Schwarzman Building is an imposing marble temple, a shrine to scholarship replete with tributes to the Astors, a Sistine Chapel-like reading room, experts in every conceivable field of study, and, during the holidays, a towering Christmas tree for tourists to pose in front of. The Mid-Manhattan, by contrast, can appear to outsiders as a run-down hangout, where New Yorkers unbathed, unhinged, or just perennially unoccupied spend hours staring at the same page of a prop book or manically writing on wrinkled yellow notepads, like an army of latter-day Joe Goulds. Beneath the bleak, utilitarian architecture is an anything-goes spirit. You can plug in your power cord wherever you like, even if you have to weave it through three other people’s desks. More than once I have observed technically prohibited behavior: a man watching questionable material on his phone, a woman giving herself an improvised shower in the restroom. The only rule I’ve seen stringently enforced is the one against sleeping; the second someone nods off over his book a guard appears to say, “Excuse me, sir.”

As a freelancer whose small Brooklyn apartment was long ago colonized by Legos, I cherish each version of the library work experience. While my writer friends invest in writing rooms or loiter at cafés, I prefer to settle in at one of the New York Public Library’s myriad branches. Recently, I was granted another spell in one of the two glorious by-their-leave semi-private study rooms inside the main building. The air there is sweet, the mood calm. When you request books, they magically appear on your shelf. And yet the place can be intimidating for the uninitiated. The guards at Schwarzman do not tend to greet visitors with particular warmth. When I arrived at 10 A.M. the other day, just as the library was opening, the woman who unlocked the doors yelled, “No luggage! No luggage!” to two young women, who looked confused and then rolled their suitcases sadly away. The closing of the glorious Rose Reading Room for repairs, meanwhile, has thrown independent scholars into exile—you see them camped out with their laptops in various Schwarzman hallways and anterooms, like passengers at LaGuardia whose flight has been cancelled. (I had feared that the room would be closed forever, but the N.Y.P.L. has announced that it’s set to reopen ahead of schedule, in late fall of this year.)

My husband refuses to go to the main branch, because he says he was shamed by staff when he tried to decipher their byzantine system of ordering books. I, too, have been scolded twice there over the years, both times by fellow researchers in the Wertheim study room, where tables teem with academics toiling on books about capitalism and spies and C. S. Lewis. Once, a woman at my table leaned over and said angrily, “I can hear that!” as she pointed at my headphones, which I was using to transcribe an interview. I could barely hear the recording myself, so I think she may have been hallucinating. Another time, I was in the Wertheim Room with the “Project Runway” co-host Tim Gunn, with whom I was collaborating on a book of fashion history. We were flipping through some old fashion magazines, tracing the evolution of denim advertising. It was St. Patrick’s Day, and the windows were open, letting in the loud noise of bagpipes from the parade passing below, so we didn’t think much of our whispering. Yet soon enough we heard the sound, from the other side of a partition, of a woman clearing her throat. We didn’t think it could be for us, so we kept looking through our book. Again, the throat clearing, then a strident voice: “This is a silent workspace. Conversations should be held _out_side.” Tim and I looked at each other in alarm, packed up our books, and decided to go to lunch early. “Did you get a load of the crowd in there?” Tim said as we left. “It’s like being inside a Roz Chast cartoon.”

If the New York Public Library branches were colleges, the Schwarzman Building would be Harvard or Yale and the Mid-Manhattan would be a community college. And then, I suppose, the stately Society Library, on Seventy-ninth Street, where I am also a member, would be Oxford. When you’re in the Society Library (which was founded in the eighteenth century; there is a charter from King George III hanging on the wall) you are reminded of the many advantages of having money: the workspaces are clean and well-lit; there are even some desks tucked away in the stacks, which make you feel like you’re in a tree house built out of books. The upper floors of the building are open only to members who pay an annual fee, but there are no library cards: as you come into the building, you tell your name to the person at the front desk, who looks you up in the computer and then genteelly gestures you ahead. In the cozy children’s room, you can say to the friendly, wildly well-educated librarian, “My son is looking for some Harry Potter-ish audiobooks,” and you will leave with ten genius selections and an impeccably curated brochure listing the best books for children who are fans of the series.

Still, I don’t go to the Society Library every day, unless I’m doing research on a nineteenth-century eccentric or other topics in their wheelhouse. It is pretty far from Brooklyn, and the private study rooms often must be reserved in advance, which requires more forethought than I can manage most weeks. Plus, it’s too nice to use as my go-to branch; that would be like eating prime rib every night.

My very first New York public library was the Jefferson Market branch, located in a former courthouse on Sixth Avenue in Greenwich Village. When I was around seven, my class went there one weekday when our nearby elementary school had to be evacuated. My memory is that it was raining that day, so the teachers didn’t want us in the yard, and so we sat in the library until it was deemed safe to return to class. (Because this was the eighties, before the invention of sugar-coating, they informed us kids that the evacuation was the result of a bomb threat.) Around that time, I became very competitive in the library’s Summer Reading contest. By compulsively reporting the books I’d completed to the Jefferson Market librarian, I was able to move my little construction-paper avatar along the corkboard behind her desk. After reading approximately a million books I won an eraser or something, and from that moment I felt like libraries were somewhere I belonged.

These days, when I have time to kill before or after meetings and have already had too much caffeine, instead of stopping into a coffee shop I will tap the N.Y.P.L. app on my phone to find the nearest branch, and then I’ll go there for a while to work, and to people-watch. Some branches teem with nannies, their charges happily gumming board books. Others, like the Performing Arts Library at Lincoln Center, draw a crowd that seems too young and attractive to be hanging out in a public library. Less than a block from where I grew up in the East Village is the little old Ottendorfer branch, which was built by German-immigrant philanthropists, in 1883. When I was a kid, I loved the metal catwalk that housed rows of foreign-language books, and would take any excuse to wander around up there. Today most of the offerings for adults are kept to the main floor, which on most days when I visit seems full of conspiracy theorists reading newspapers.

I often have meetings in Chelsea, and so for a while I would make do with the often-crowded Muhlenberg on Twenty-third Street. But then I discovered the Andrew Heiskell branch a few blocks south, which prides itself on its trove of Braille and talking books, a good assortment of desks, a sunny children’s room, and a peaceful atmosphere. My old friend Jefferson Market, with its beautiful stained-glass windows, still might be my choice for best library in the city, if not for one fatal flaw: there is no public bathroom for adults, only one for children and for those lucky enough to have a child in tow. The rest of us can work on our laptops for only so long before we must tromp over to the nearby Lenwich or French Roast and spend more than we meant to on lunch just to earn the right to pee.

A patron perusing the stacks at the New York Public Library’s Mid-Manhattan branch. Photograph by Piotr Redlinski / The New York Times / Redux

Photograph by Piotr Redlinski / The New York Times / Redux

But while each of these branches has something unique to offer, the one I keep circling back to is the Mid-Manhattan. I tell myself it’s because they have an incredible selection of books in open stacks, cheerful librarians and guards, and a surprising trove of city services (last year, I applied for my IDNYC there). But really I think it’s because of the library’s waiting-room-at-the-end-of-the-world sense of freedom. I gave a book talk there recently, and it was one of the most engaged crowds I’ve ever spoken to. One woman in the front row cheered as if she were at a rock concert. To me, she exemplified the Mid-Manhattan spirit: a little daffy, infinitely welcoming.

In recent years, there has been much talk about what to do with the various library branches as they continue to adapt to the digital era. Originally, the Mid-Manhattan was due to be sold and its services moved into a fully renovated main building. Now those controversial plans have been scrapped in favor of a new “Midtown Campus Renovation,” and the Mid-Manhattan has been tapped for an overhaul, with designs set to be unveiled later this year, and completed by 2019. The carpets could certainly use a good cleaning, and it would be nice if the elevators and climate control worked better, but I hope the revamp won’t alter the branch’s freewheeling energy. On a recent morning, after checking out a pile of books at the Mid-Manhattan, I headed over to the Schwarzman to sit at an elegant wooden desk in the Allen Room, my work spread out under a pretty green-shaded desk lamp. Before long, someone’s phone pinged and the room grew tense, and I found myself missing the grubby comfort a block and a world away.